YES - John Andrews, senior service manager, Rainer Northamptonshire
From my experience, young people are no worse than 20 years ago. But you wouldn't believe it by looking at the way young people are portrayed in the media.
The negative labelling of young people as "yobs" and "hoodies" has led to this distorted view that the youth of today are out of control. In fact, the vast majority of young people in this country are well-behaved, law-abiding members of their communities. The problem is that we hear very little about them.
This year is Rainer's bicentenary and if you look back to 1806 you find the equivalent of antisocial behaviour even back then. In fact, newspaper reports suggested "hanging's too good for them".
So we need to get current debates into context and focus on the underlying reasons why a minority of young people end up causing problems. It's worth pointing out that the victims of youth crime are most often young people themselves.
NO - Bob Mardle, street-based youth work co-ordinator, Nuneaton, Warwickshire
They're not better behaved, but they're certainly not worse behaved, although there is a perception that they are.
It's just that the adult community is less tolerant. There are adults in the local community that I call "curtain twitchers", who always have their nose out of the window and always have something to say about young people.
And because they now have a way to get what they want - antisocial behaviour orders - they get in touch with their local council and police and complain about young people doing very ordinary things.
I got an email recently from the local town council asking if I could respond to a call from a local resident, because young people were playing football outside their house. It was like an old-fashioned village green in the middle of some houses, and you could see that it would attract young people. This was normal behaviour, which was no different from whenever football was invented.
NO - Dave Stannard, youth worker, West Midlands
It's a lot harder for young people just to be themselves today. There's more pressure to behave in certain ways, as well as to wear the right clothes, own the right mobile phone, even to talk in a particular way.
Reality television makes many young people believe that success and fame are easily achieved, so they are less inclined to show "stickability".
But none of this makes their behaviour better or worse.
It might be true to say that youth workers see the better side of young people's behaviour. Perhaps that's because they choose to take part in the activities we offer them, and see the sense in getting involved. Teachers have a harder time now than 20 years ago. Young people no longer take schooling at face value. "Work hard, do well and you'll get a job" just isn't the case any more. What has not changed, however, is that where teachers treat young people with respect, they are given respect back.
YES - Tim Bateman, senior policy development officer, Nacro
The suggestion that the behaviour of teenagers today is on average less problematic than that of their parents may come as a surprise to many, but it is consistent with the official data for youth crime. Detected youth offending began to fall during the 1980s, and the trend has continued ever since. In 2004, the number of children processed by the youth justice system was 21 per cent lower than in 1992.
Why, then, are we so taken aback by the suggestion that behaviour has improved? In part, it is a question of being clear about what is being claimed: to say fewer children engage in fighting, vandalism, smoking and drinking is not to deny that we should be concerned about those who still do. Secondly, each generation tends to look back to a golden era - associated with its own youth - in which young people were less lawless.
Attempts to find such a past have proved fruitless, but the rose-tinted perception of our own childhood inevitably skews our comparisons.
